


In At The Death

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Battle of Scarif, Evacuation of Hoth, Everyone Dies Eventually, F/M, Force-Sensitive Leia Organa, Gen, Some Very Seriously Miserable And Co-Dependent People, The Force, battle of endor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-02
Updated: 2017-03-02
Packaged: 2018-09-27 22:40:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10054835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Rogue One does not survive the war, and there's nothing Leia Organa or anyone else can do to stop that.





	

**Author's Note:**

> With grateful thanks to celeste, who beta'd this, and venusmelody/rosaxx50, who unintentionally inspired it during a chat in her comments section and has since referred to this as 'the death fic'.
> 
> Well, she's not wrong.

            Now that Alderaan is gone, and Leia’s pretence in the Senate with it, she remains with the Rebel Alliance full-time. She welcomes the work; it’s easy to lose herself in it, and she likes that best these days, to be so buried in reports and intelligence and tactical manoeuvres that her colleagues don’t even call her by her name because they’re all elbows-deep in the war and personal identity is irrelevant. Every task she can do, every minute she can spend working for the Alliance’s victory, is a moment when she’s not thinking about Alderaan. A moment when she’s just another cog in the machine that will bring down the Alliance.

 

            Rogue One seem to think the same way. Separate to her gratitude for their sacrifices for the Rebellion, Leia can’t help but approve. Four of six of the original team returned from the surface of Scarif, not counting the sailors, pilots and ground forces who had thrown in their lot with the Rogues; all four of that team move like they want to turn their faces into death and smile. Even the droid, which Leia will admit is slightly odd.

 

            There’s a bronze plaque that memorialises the Battle of Scarif. It’s quite large, on account of the number of people who died, but Chirrut Îmwe and Baze Malbus’s names are at the top. People touch it for luck before a mission, but Leia has never seen a member of Rogue One so much as look at it.

 

            Leia doesn’t really know them. Nobody does. Draven occasionally takes it into his head to shout at them, but there’s never any guarantee that more than half of them are listening. Their orders come direct from Draven or from Mon Mothma – more often Mon Mothma, who has a particular soft spot for them that she will never admit to. They always take the most dangerous missions, the ones least likely to succeed, the ones that are the most deniable and have the greatest pay-off for the greatest risks.

 

            _If it’s a million to one chance, throw Erso at it_ , some of Intelligence likes to say. _Rook and Andor will follow on, and the droid’ll go too, and that way, it all comes out in the wash._

 

            Leia has seen them return from missions – her pilots, some of whom are Imperial defectors and one of whom is soft-hearted Luke, have taken Bodhi Rook under their capacious wing, and tend to mother-hen him – and she suspects that mostly what comes out in the wash is blood and other people’s stomach acid.

 

            Cassian Andor helped train Leia. As a girl – she feels almost like she should say ‘as a child’, because the gulf between her at eighteen and her at twenty feels impassable – she had the most shocking crush on him. He’s more silent now than he was then, but he smiles more, too; in one particular direction, Leia has noticed. Rogue One orbit each other like planetary moons around Scarif, but Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso’s orbits are particularly complex.

 

            Rogue One are coming out of Mon Mothma’s office as Leia’s going in, and when Leia lets herself into Mon Mothma’s cramped cubicle, the older woman is staring at the opposite wall with her lips folded into a very tight pale line. She looks like she’s seen a ghost.

 

            “Are you all right?” Leia asks, startled, closing the door carefully behind her. She tilts her head in the general direction of Rogue One, at the other end of the corridor by now. “Did they have… bad news?”

 

            Leia hadn’t thought so. When she passed them, Kaytoo was being extremely sarcastic in the carrying voice bequeathed to him by his new casing, and Bodhi Rook was laughing.

 

            “No,” Mon Mothma says. “I just wonder…”

 

            Leia sits down.

 

            Mon Mothma taps a stylus on her desk. “This war has been particularly cruel to some people. I sometimes wonder if the peace will, in some ways, be worse.”

 

            Leia doesn’t understand until a few days later, when Han Solo gets a bit drunk (and gets Luke _trashed_ , incidentally) and smiles at her in that soft way he does sometimes. _Hey, princess. What do you think you’ll do, when all this is over?_

 

            Leia realises that she can’t imagine a life that isn’t like this, despite her gentle, loving parents and her privileged girlhood, and she wonders – how much worse is it, for those who have never in their entire lives known peace?

 

            Something makes her shiver. She doesn’t know what.

 

***

 

            There is risk in everything the Rebellion does. Arguably, there’s risk in everything any sentient does. That is as true of running an unexpected Imperial blockade as it is of anything else.

 

            Still, Leia thinks it’s cruel that after everything Bodhi Rook’s done for the Rebel Alliance, every mad risk he’s taken from the moment his shuttle lifted off from Eadu, what kills him is a stray reflected shot from a TIE fighter as he flies a shuttle in the evacuation of Hoth.

 

            Leia hears at the time, of course. Bodhi Rook dies early on in the Battle of Hoth, and Leia is still in the control room. She spares half a moment to mourn him, one of the most crucial cogs in the machine that brought down the Death Star before it could inflict Alderaan’s death on any more planets. But everything gets out of her control quite quickly, what with their rocky evacuation in the Millennium Falcon, and she doesn’t have time to appreciate until later that Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor and Kaytoo fought a rearguard action on Hoth’s surface as Bodhi Rook’s shuttle exploded. That they would have seen his final starburst in the sky, but didn’t know until much later that it had been Bodhi who died.

 

            The Rebellion’s losses at Hoth were so great they were almost incalculable. It took a long time – a _very_ long time -  for the casualty lists to be finalised. 

 

            That knowledge sits in Leia’s stomach like a stone when she glimpses the remnants of Rogue One on the hospital ship. She only sees them because Luke flinches, and she somehow knows that it isn’t a physical pain which ails him.

 

            Cassian Andor still moves like a hunting cat. Jyn Erso still has haunted eyes. And Leia doesn’t know if she’s changed or they have, but something about their presence for the split second they’re in the same corridor makes the ambient temperature drop a good ten degrees.

 

            “They hurt so much,” Luke half-croaks, sounding like the magnitude of it has jumped up and grabbed him by the throat. He looks overwhelmed.

 

            Leia holds onto his hand as hard as she can until it comes time for her to report to Mon Mothma.

 

            Mon Mothma has a number of stress toys in her desk drawers which she never uses around her subordinates. Leia takes it as a point of pride that she has seen at least three of the seven she thinks exist. When Leia finally makes it to Mon Mothma’s office, her mentor is systematically disassembling one of those toys.

 

            Which is to say she’s ripping it to shreds.

 

            “If I could give them a quiet life,” Mon Mothma says, and again, that half-awareness comes to Leia’s rescue. She knows exactly who Mon’s talking about.

 

            “Is there any such thing?” Leia says.

 

            Mon Mothma looks at Leia like the fact that she doesn’t know if there’s such a thing as a quiet life might be part of the problem.

 

            Leia helps her clean up the ruined stress toy.

 

 

            As soon as his new hand’s been fitted, Luke spends an hour meditating. His choice of location seems odd until Leia realises that Jyn Erso has gravitated to him, like a planet to the sun, and is sitting cross-legged with one fist curled tightly around the necklace she never removes. Leia assumes she’s meditating, too, although she hadn’t realised Erso was religious.

 

            Leia looks around, and in the shadows she spots Kaytoo, powered down, and Cassian Andor, cleaning a blaster rifle. Leia helps herself to a bucket of old spare parts that need cleaning, and joins him.

 

            “Do you think it helps?” she asks, when she thinks it might be safe.

 

            “It makes Jyn feel better,” Andor says, which is not an answer – or then again, maybe it is. He looks much older, and much more tired, than he did before the Battle of Hoth.

 

            The half-healed wound of Alderaan aches behind her ribs. Leia wonders.

 

            “It’s tough,” Leia says to the latest rusty spare part – this comes from a X3-class astromech, she thinks; being friends with Luke is instructive. “Losing family.”

 

            Andor doesn’t say a word.

 

            When Erso opens her eyes, she’s looking straight at him.

 

            _If I could give them a quiet life –_

 

            Leia understands Mon Mothma better every day.

 

***

 

            Compared to that, the loss of the droid – Kaytoo – is almost anticlimactic. He has received three new chassis and resorted to five different back-ups in the last two years, because he says it’s logical to shield Erso and Andor from blasterfire. After all, they can’t just reboot into a new chassis.

 

            (Yes, being Luke’s friend is very instructive. Mon Mothma has taken to asking Leia about the droids as well as the pilots, and why Mon thinks Leia knows anything about droids Leia does not know, but for some reason she always has the answer to the question Mon asks.)

 

            It’s also logical that one day there would not be enough back-ups. There were three, Leia understands, sitting in a cramped command post and watching Luke commandeer tools and time and space in his sweet-smiling way. One of them, Andor explains to Luke, was blown up with their ship, in a dockyard on Bestine. Another was in a safehouse which was burned to the ground to stop Imperials ransacking it yesterday. The third is corrupted, and Luke and Cassian between them are trying to repair it.

 

            Leia is working on her paperwork and trying not to eavesdrop too obviously. By the look on Erso’s face as she cleans her fingernails with a knife, Leia isn’t doing a great job.

 

            Luke refuses to give up on Kaytoo for several hours, but eventually even he has to admit that there’s no bringing Kaytoo back. The corrupted back-up boots, yes, but it boots in such a fashion that it attempts to kill Andor and Erso is forced to blow its head off.

 

            Luke apologises profusely, but it’s obvious that there’s nothing to be done and no comfort to offer. Andor’s voice seems to have been stolen; Erso tries to reassure Luke, but she’s harsh and monosyllabic, and Leia doesn’t think she means to be. They’re both very pale. Leia thinks Andor might even be shaking.

 

           

            Leia tells Mon Mothma about it at her next informal briefing.

 

            Mon Mothma shuts her patient eyes and curls her hands into fists. Kaytoo was just a droid, but so is Threepio, so is Artoo, and the more time Leia spends with Luke, the more she comes to think a droid can be a person in many more ways than most people care to admit to. And even if he was _just_ a droid, he was an integral member of Rogue One, and there are not a lot of those left.

 

            _Four down_ , Leia thinks, with a dreadful sense of inevitability.

 

            Leia has never been able to protect anything in her life – not her parents, not Alderaan, not Luke, not Han, not the Rebellion. But Force damn it, she wishes she could.

 

            Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso are operatives. Brilliant – heroes – but ultimately dispensable and fragile. The deaths of Chirrut Îmwe, Baze Malbus, Bodhi Rook and Kaytoo prove that. They’re there for Leia to use, not to protect, and Leia won’t go back on that, any more than she will go back on using herself.

 

            But Force damn it, she wishes she could.

 

***

 

            Leia’s heart doesn’t sink when she sees that Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor are rostered on for Han’s mission to Endor. She has signed herself on, in defiance of Mon Mothma’s orders and a lot of protocols: in the face of a second Death Star no-one has the heart to stop her. Mon Mothma does try, but Leia ignores her.

 

            Leia isn’t Luke. She doesn’t have his powers, however often she knows what will happen next, or what someone is going to say – however often she suspects there is something less than natural to her knowledge of where Luke is, and whether or not he’s safe. She mostly dismisses what Luke says about the Force being strong with his sister – _yes; it’s you, Leia_.

 

            She’ll report it to Mon Mothma later. Maybe it’ll be of use. In the meantime, however, all her focus is on this potentially pivotal battle. She doesn’t have time to think about the last remaining pieces of Rogue One throwing themselves into the line of fire. She doesn’t have time for anything resembling a premonition –

 

            And yet.

 

            Maybe it is the Force that leads her to step off the path by the Ewok village. That leads her to push aside an enormous fern, and find Jyn Erso, or what’s left of her; gasping out her life, under the brightest and most joyous moon Leia’s ever seen.

 

            Erso’s eyes open when Leia touches her throat. There’s a pulse, and Erso reaches for her, weak hand wavering. Her chest is a mess of blood and flesh and sickly-gleaming bone, her kyber crystal scarlet-slick; there’s nothing that bacta patches can do for her in this state, and she doesn’t recognise Leia, but she’s not dead yet.

 

            Leia doesn’t need the Force to tell her to run for Cassian Andor. He’s quickly found – Leia wouldn’t take a bet that said he was looking for his partner – and when he sees that Leia’s hands are bloody he moves fast. Andor is a killer, brutal and ruthless and unhesitating, but Leia has never seen anything so gentle as the way he lifts Erso into his arms.

 

            “We won,” he’s saying, “ _querida_ , we won –”

 

            Leia feels like an interloper, faced with this much grief. She leaves them to it, and never sees Jyn Erso again.

 

 

            Cassian Andor debriefs with Mon Mothma before Leia does. He wears Jyn’s kyber crystal now.

 

            Mon Mothma shreds another stress toy between her fingers. _Five down_ , Leia thinks. She can’t bring herself to cry.

 

            “He asked for a mission,” Mon Mothma volunteers, uncharacteristically. It’s not like her to give Leia information like this, even if Leia is in some ways her acknowledged successor. Leia fears she will be a disappointment – too much the soldier, and not enough the politician – but she owes it to Mon to try. “I gave him one.”

 

            “Maybe,” Leia says, “if we can find enough missions – there’ll be enough that’s suited to his skills; the war isn’t over yet –”

 

            Mon Mothma nods. For once, Leia isn’t sure if they’re both thinking the same thing. Personally, she isn’t sure if she’s hoping that Cassian Andor will die a quick and painless death in the service of the Alliance he has sacrificed everything for, or if he will live long enough to learn to live by and for himself.

 

            That evening she’s eating dinner with Han and Luke – Luke can sort of cook, though he gets frustrated when he can’t replicate his Aunt Beru’s recipes – when Han says that he heard Erso died.

 

            Leia nods.

 

            “Bad for Andor,” Han says, with a kind of seriousness that belies the fact that he has his mouth full, which Leia kind of wants to shout at him for. He swallows conscientiously before finishing his sentence. “You never saw them apart.”

 

            “No,” Leia says in a very small voice, and then she’s crying, and it’s not even about Rogue One except that it _is_. It’s about how much they have lost, how much will never be recoverable, how the bitter corrosion of a war of attrition has ground the galaxy into raw meat, and the blank look in Cassian Andor’s eyes as he holds on to a dead woman’s necklace because it’s all he has left.

 

            Leia is crying because _there is so little left_ , because their losses are so great and they are not yet done, because Leia has never been able to protect anything, and Force damn it but she wishes she could.

 

            “Hey, hey, hey,” Han says, and pulls her onto his lap and holds her head against his shoulder and murmurs soothing nonsense; Luke moves over to sit close to them, leans his head against hers and puts an arm around them both, and tries to project calm.

 

            The wonderful thing about knowing she’s Force-sensitive is knowing that she really isn’t imagining that he’s doing this. It means she can yell at him for trying to improve her mood by proxy, which makes her feel better.

 

            “Well, this makes a change, your worshipfulness,” Han remarks. “Normally you’d be shouting at me by now.”

 

            “ _Ugh_ ,” Leia says into Han’s chest, which is warm and solid and has always been irritatingly comforting.

 

            She loves them both more than words, and that almost helps.

 

 

***

 

            For a while, Leia thinks that she and Mon are going to get away with this ridiculous, sentimental plan. There really are plenty of things that need doing that are ideally suited to Cassian Andor’s skills.

 

Leia sends him off to sneak in and plant charges for the Pathfinders to blow. She has Han drag him to the other end of the Emerald Nebula to rescue some political prisoners (Andor and Han get on about as well as a pair of angry wampas, but Andor likes Chewbacca, and Han complains when they get back that Chewbacca and Andor spent the entire time talking shit about him). Luke wheedles him into helping collect Jedi artifacts, many of which are in Imperial collectors’ hands – or were, until Andor got involved. Leia has him handle late defectors, she leaves him to the tender mercies of an army of technicians who want to know exactly how he reprogrammed Kaytoo all those years ago, and when inspiration does not strike she finds herself something dangerous to do and gets Mon to assign him to watch her back. She wouldn’t say that he _enjoys_ scolding her in rapid-fire Alderaanian with that heavy Festian accent, but if he’s yelling at her, he isn’t sitting around like a powered-down droid, devoid of purpose or life.

 

            “It might work,” Mon Mothma says, after coldly ordering Andor out of the room, as one of these homilies has chased Leia all the way to Mon Mothma’s office, and they’re all still trying to pretend that normal working relations are in order.

 

            “It might,” Leia says, but that Force sense that she could get to hate is telling her she’s wrong, and the hope in Mon Mothma’s eyes is tempered with weariness. Andor is an operative to use, not a person to protect, and there was never any way that they could save him – never any way to save Rogue One. Force knows that they were not the first to try, but it seems as if they will be the last.

 

            Leia and Mon Mothma are running out of ways to keep Andor on the move, and his life is nowhere near as important as ending the war.

 

Within a year Leia’s putting her name to a peace treaty; Mon Mothma’s signature is a couple of layers above hers, and when Mon says _your parents would be so proud_ Leia knows she’s referring to at least three people.

 

Leia doesn’t look into the shadowy corners of the room where she knows Andor is watching. She thinks he knows that this is his last lifeline withering away. Rogue One died on Endor: none of them could have been Rogue One alone, and Leia thinks that Andor is particularly ill-suited to living on without either his team or his Rebellion to draw purpose from.

 

            She could push her luck, Leia supposes. Her mother had men like Andor at her beck and call. Her father was an Imperial senator, and his aides were strictly civilian; Breha Organa had spies at her disposal.

 

            But Leia’s mother was a queen. Leia is only Leia, and if she’s princess of anything, she’s princess of ash. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do next, to the great disappointment and surprise of Mon, the holonews, and a large number of people whose business it isn’t. She’s constantly wavering on the edge of accepting Han’s offer to go and freewheel among the stars with him and Luke, and she’s in no shape to give anyone orders. If she asked Andor to join her service, he might not refuse, but Cassian Andor is nobody’s fool, and Leia is sure that her excuses are wearing as thin as Mon Mothma’s. He would know there wasn’t truly anything for him to do.

 

            He would know that any offer of employment from her was pity, and Leia is fairly sure he wouldn’t forgive her that.

 

            She isn’t surprised when Andor hands his resignation to Mon Mothma. She isn’t surprised when he takes a shuttle in lieu of the amazing amount of back-pay he’s owed. Luke fixes it up, in payment of some unspecified and probably fictitious debt he owed to Bodhi Rook and then Erso – Luke has some funny Tatooinian notions about life debts. Luke also tips Leia off as to Andor’s time of departure, by the very simple expedient of breaking something in the shuttle so that Andor physically _can’t_ leave until Luke has mended it.

 

             Leia thinks Andor sees through this too, because he isn’t surprised either.

 

             She shakes his hand, like she would if she were giving him a medal.

 

            “ _Que la Fuerza te acompañe_ ,” she tells him, in the shared language they speak so differently. There are plenty of Alderaanians around, one way or another, and Andor’s accent is certainly worse than anyone else’s bar Luke’s, but Leia will miss speaking Alderaanian with someone who doesn’t treat her like the orphaned princess in a white dress who has been such a useful symbol of loss and tyranny to the Rebellion. That girl died a long time ago, and Leia resents that she still has to live up to her image.

 

            For half a second, he almost smiles.

 

            Leia doesn’t ask him where he’s going. She isn’t a fool.

 

 

            For several weeks, Leia and Luke share dreams. This happens occasionally, and doesn’t bother either of them. Han claims to find it unnerving, but has never actually flinched from it.

 

            Leia finds Luke in the galley of the Millennium Falcon, face screwed up against a headache as he brews caf in the middle of the night.

 

            “Desert,” he says. “Bits of ruined temples. Massive crater.”

 

            Leia’s seen the holos. “Jedha.”

 

            If possible, Luke’s face scrunches up even further. “It’s that kriffing kyber crystal,” he says, and is kind enough not to mention Leia’s strong emotional connection to the Rogue One team, who tried as hard to save Alderaan as she did to save them.

 

            “I suppose you could send him a comm and tell him to take it off,” Leia snaps.

 

            “But nothing,” Luke says, unhelpfully and irrelevantly. Leia goes back to bed.

 

            When they hit hyperspace four days later, Leia says to Luke: “Oh – I worked it out. It was Eadu.”

 

            “What,” Han says.

 

            “Never mind,” Luke says, looking persecuted.

 

            Leia is increasingly beginning to wonder a) how she managed to do this, because she’s fairly sure it’s her fault, and b) if she’s going to have to watch Cassian Andor die. She hasn’t seen him in the dreams; she hasn’t seen anyone, although she knows Luke is there. But she’s pretty confident that if she were, somehow, to track that one specific shuttle, its flight path would have led it between Jedha and Eadu.

 

           

            “Bestine,” Luke informs her the following night, waking her up from where she’s fallen asleep over her reading.

 

            Leia can still see the covered market in an echoing metal warehouse. “How the hell do you know?”

 

            Luke shrugs uncomfortably.

 

 

             The last dream is of a low concrete building that Luke thinks is a farmhouse, although it’s very different to the ones he knew on Tatooine. There’s a lot of black shale and vivid green vegetation. The sky’s very grey, and the farm is long abandoned. Twenty years, if Leia had to guess.

 

            There’s a terrible finality to the crunch of the shale under her feet. There’s a feeling of stasis. This is a waiting place.

 

            Leia reaches out in her sleep and accidentally elbows Han in the face. In her dream, she takes Luke’s hand.

 

            Together they wander around the farm. It’s set in a place of steep slopes and flat plateaus; the grass, if it’s grass, is high.

 

            _That crystal has been all over this place_ , Luke groans. They find a cave with a tiny bolt-hole, rusted shut. They find doors hanging off their hinges, and vegetation growing wild.

 

            It’s Luke who eventually cracks and shouts for Andor. Leia is too busy trying to sift through what she now understands are someone else’s memories and thoughts, pressing down on her.

 

            There is no response.

           

            Leia almost treads on the toy. It’s a child’s doll in the shape of a stormtrooper, a popular Imperial amusement. Leia had one, a gift from someone on Coruscant currying favour with Viceroy Organa in exactly the wrong way. In her innocence, Leia played with it; little gestures like that probably saved her life.

 

            Leia picks it up. It’s as old and worn as the farm is. She holds onto it tight, but when she wakes up she hasn’t got it, because it was just a dream: because it isn’t real.

 

            Leia still has copies of the Rogue One files. She shouldn’t, but that’s irrelevant. She thinks – Jedha, Eadu, Bestine – and chooses Jyn Erso’s. It makes sense, since she was the last to die.

 

            _Second-last_ , Leia corrects herself, and _six down_ , she thinks.

 

            Jyn Erso died for the first time on a planet called Lah’mu, aged eight. A quick search of the holonet pulls up pictures of Lah’mu, its steep slopes, its black shale, its green vegetation and its grey skies.

 

 

            Leia comms Mon Mothma to tell her Cassian Andor is dead.

 

            Mon Mothma doesn’t argue with her.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr at [ rain-sleet-snow](https://rain-sleet-snow.tumblr.com/). Come and say hi! :)


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